The Dardenne Brothers Retrospective: The Promise (La Promesse)

24 Apr 2015

La Promesse, the film that garnered the Dardennes international attention, is a harrowing rites-of-passage story partly inspired by Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Depicting Europe as a soulless capitalist subjecting the underdeveloped world to a new form of slavery, the film focuses on the feud that develops between an apprentice mechanic and his immigrant-trafficking father over how to help the widow of an African worker. La Promesse represents a bold statement that established the Dardennes’ social-realistic aesthetic for the many inspiring stories that followed.